Competition proposals for the ICDM data mining conference

We're not the only ones casting about for interesting competition ideas. The prestigious ICDM data mining conference, taking place from December 13-17 in Sydney, is also looking proposals. See below for the details.

The ICDM Data Mining (DM) Contest offers a unique opportunity to scientists and enterprises, to involve teams of domain experts that will compete against each other in order to develop and test data mining techniques that can improve real or realistic applications. A typical workflow of the ICDM DM Contest is as follows: Organizers provide participants with custom datasets, evaluation metrics (or software tools) and expected answers to a set of predetermined tasks. The participants are then asked to identify the best possible solutions to the given tasks maximizing the given evaluation metrics. Each competing team will work offline to implement the tasks outlined by the contest organizers. The results of each team will be submitted to the contest organizers along with a short description prior the conference date. The contest organizers will select the submissions that will be included in the proceedings of the conference. The awarding process will be carried out during the conference. In an effort to attract more participation, organizers are encouraged to seek awards and prizes from sponsoring entities, although the acceptance of the proposal is not contingent upon this suggestion.

There is no specific format for the proposals, but in your submission please include the following information:

Contest title and abstract

Contact information of the organizer(s)

General description of the problem.

Description of the dataset to be used.

Description of the actual competition tasks.

Evaluation metrics or Tool that will do the evaluation.

Short biography of the organizer(s)

The proposal should include enough information to provide a clear sense of the proposed competition. The results of the contest will be presented in a special session during the conference, and a description of the challenge and articles from the winners will be included in the ICDM'10 proceedings. Other points that should be taken into account are as follows:

The dataset should be interesting, available, and sufficiently large.

There should be at least three different tasks that participants can compete in.

The tasks should be interesting and novel, but also accessible without too much domain specific knowledge.

Anthony Goldbloom
is the founder and CEO of Kaggle. Before founding Kaggle, Anthony worked in the macroeconomic modeling areas of the Reserve Bank of Australia and before that the Australian Treasury. He holds a first class honours degree in economics and econometrics from the University of Melbourne and has published in The Economist magazine and the Australian Economic Review.